This widely acclaimed memoir is a vivid account of a young Italian American girl's struggle to transcend the limits imposed on her life and documents the making of a working-class writer and scholar. It has been declared "a brave, heart-wrenchingly honest and utterly un-put-down-able memoir. Young Louise DeSalvo leaps from the pages in all her brightness and brashness." --Robert Cormier author of The Chocolate Wars

"DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Very creative . . . Vertigo brings the past to the present and transforms pain into power and pleasure." —Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero

"One of the pleasures of Vertigo is its continual sense that DeSalvo's own history is as mysterious to her as it might be to us, that she, like her reader, is a stranger in a strange land, a perpetual traveler." —Newsday

"Gripping and compelling. . . . DeSalvo digs deep and has written a profound work of emotional healing." —Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt